I was struck this morning when reading new diaries on Daily Kos about what seems like the ever-more inevitable escalation that Bush will propose shortly after the New Year. Predictions are appropriately on our minds these days, facing this possibility of increased violence and intensified war in Iraq. Sadly, we need to remember that Bush has always had two "enemies" in mind when he has made major decisions about Iraq: an enemy abroad, which goes by many names (axis-of-evil, dead-enders, terrorists, al qaeda, extremists, insurgents, etc) and an enemy right here that has one name: the Democratic party.
Bush's war has always been political and we need to consider the impending escalation -- and the contours of this escalation -- in terms of partisan conflict. In other words and most simply: how does Bush's plan to escalate the war in January play into his continual combat against the other party?
In asking this question, I think we can arrive at the scary reality of what this "surge" means. As other diarists are pointing out, the escalation that's in the air might not simply entail 20,000 thousand more troops who will suffer the same burden as the 140,000+ U.S. soldiers already in Iraq. It's also quite possible that both these 140,000 soldiers and the new soldiers that are sent to Iraq will have to sustain dramatically increased violence. "Doubling down" might encapsulate not only the quantity but the violent intensity of the war that Bush seeks.
The point I want to make is simply that putting troops in harm's way -- and actually harming more American troops -- might not simply be a side-effect but the intended purpose of Bush's escalation. The strategy of escalation coincides exactly with the Democratic capture of both the House and the Senate. Bush tried to steal Democratic thunder by the Rumsfield announcement the day after the elections, and is obviously timing his escalation announcement right around when the House and Senate will convene under the Democrats.
It is hard to imagine how the addition of 30,000 more troops will throw the Democrats off-stride, or off their criticism of the Iraq war. But if there is a dramatic increase in violence -- particularly violence against more actively engaged U.S. troops -- this will present a real quandry for the Democratic party. It will change "conditions on the ground," as it were, not in Iraq but in Washington D.C., where it is, of course, incredibly difficult to criticize a war policy when soldiers are engaged in active and newly intensified combat. I think this is the real meaning of "doubling down" for Bush: creating more violence in order to test and try the Democratic party.
All of Bush's most partisan efforts as President have been aimed at spliting the Democratic party in two. He has often succeeded, sometimes literally producing votes with half of all Democrats on either side of an issue. He produced this kind of division with his first tax cuts, with his medicaid bill, with Supreme Court votes (to confirm Roberts and to filibuster Alito), and, of course, with the authorization of the Iraq war. With this stubborn man, it's hard not to imagine that the desire to split the Democrats again -- particularly to split them through the intimidating reality of war -- would not be his actual, spiteful response to the midterm elections, just as his response to the Iraq Study Group was to move in the other direction.
Will doubling down in this way work? In the short term, scarily enough, I think it could. Sending 30,000 troops into the current quagmire of Iraq seems like a huge political loss for Bush. But creating more Fallujahs -- something that we haven't seen now in several years in Iraq -- could actually make it much more difficult for the Democrats to maintain unity and actively oppose the war. If Bush is doubling down, doesn't it make sense that he will double on this card: the intimidation of the opposing party through manipulation of the fear, and the impulse for patriotic obsequiance, that always accompanies war?